Faculty Workshops

This is a post from our blogging workshop! In this workshop we defined blogs and wikis, created a few blogs and wikis, and played with them individually and as a group. Here's what else happened that day.

We began school this year with a faculty workshop centering on technology. The morning included a presentation by Dr. Barbara Ganley of Middlebury College. Dr. Ganley, who grew up on the Exeter campus as the child of a teacher, shared her experience of returning to Exeter to speak to the faculty and chronicled it on her own blog.

After the talk, we broke into small groups and attended one of about a dozen workshops taught by our own faculty. It was pretty amazing to hear from our colleagues who have taken the plunge into integrating some sort of technology into the Harkness classroom. There's no formula for that exploration that we can follow from other schools. Our teachers are inventing it daily for the Harkness student and teacher. Presentations covered topics from blogs to podcasts, tablets to YouTube, movie-making to Google Earth.

Some teachers have (some might say wisely) just dipped a toe into the waters, taking one small step at a time. Others have plunged in splashingly. Both styles are great and each has risks. Technology issues often manifest themselves at the least convenient moments, and no teacher that I know wants to look foolish in front of a class of students, especially when one may already feel that the students are ahead of the teachers in this area. Having a Plan B when you work with technology for class or homework is a very good idea. So is harnessing the knowledge and lack of fear the kids already have by letting them run the show. That is very "Harkness," very student-led, which we embrace wholeheartedly around here. Technology need be no exception.

Last term I watched a teacher (who is a self-proclaimed tech newbie) let her students use whatever technology they wished to do their final presentations. There were moments when we weren't sure how we would accomplish some of the students' goals, but we persevered and the young ladies and men came in with interesting, varied approaches--all of them as rich as or richer than an oral presentation without a video component. I was excited, but not surprised, by the variety of tools and technologies the students chose. Some felt most comfortable with an outline in PowerPoint. Others fluently integrated videos into their talks. Still others adeptly moved from DVD to computer to text. All were rich examples of the wisdom of our students.